Homebrew GPU Tackles Quake

Have you ever wondered how a GPU works? Even better, have you ever wanted to make one? [Dylan] certainly did, because he made FuryGPU — a fully custom graphics card capable of playing Quake a…

IPhone 6S NVMe Chip Tapped Using A Flexible PCB

Psst! Hey kid! Want to reverse-engineer some iPhones? Well, did you know that modern iPhones use PCIe, and specifically, NVMe for their storage chips? And if so, have you ever wondered about sniffi…

Getting PCIe Working On The New Pi 5

After the Pi 4 released, a discovery was quickly made that the internals of the popular single-board computer use PCIe to communicate with each other. This wasn’t an accessible PCIe bus norma…

BeagleV®-Fire

New BeagleV-Fire features FPGA and RISC-V CPU and is available now around $150. Credit-card sized, Linux-enabled board based on Microchip Polarfire SoC offers high-speed I/O with BeagleBone cape compatible headers and SYZYGY and M.2 connectors.

The IMac GPU Becomes Upgradeable, With PCIe

Over its long lifetime, the Apple iMac all-in-one computer has morphed from the early CRT models through those odd table-lamp machines into today’s beautiful sleek affairs. They look pretty, …

Running A Modern Graphics Card In A 33 MHz PCI Slot

If you ever looked at a PCI to PCIe x16 adapter and wondered what’d happen if you were to stick a modern PCIe GPU in it, the answer apparently is ‘it works’ according to an attemp…

PCIe For Hackers: Our M.2 Card Is Done

We’ve started designing a PCIe card last week, an adapter from M.2 E-key to E-key, that adds an extra link to the E-key slot it carries – useful for fully utilizing a few rare but fancy…

PCIe For Hackers: An M.2 Card Journey

I’ve designed a few M.2 adapters for my own and my friends’ use, and having found those designs online, people have asked me for custom-made adapters. One of these requests is quite spe…

Server Network Cards Made Extra Cool

Using cheap and powerful server expansion cards in your desktop builds is a tempting option for many hackers. Of course, they don’t always fit mechanically or work perfectly; for instance, so…

PCIe For Hackers: Extracting The Most

So, you now know the basics of approaching PCIe, and perhaps you have a PCIe-related goal in mind. Maybe you want to equip a single-board computer of yours with a bunch of cheap yet powerful PCIe W…

PCIe For Hackers: Link Anatomy

Last time, we looked over diffpairs, their basics, routing rules and the notorious tolerances of PCIe when it comes to diffpairs. Now, let’s take a look at the exact signals that make PCIe ti…

PCIe For Hackers: The Diffpair Prelude

PCIe, also known as PCI-Express, is a highly powerful interface. So let’s see what it takes to hack on something that powerful. PCIe is be a bit intimidating at first, however it is reasonabl…

What Else Is An M.2 WiFi Slot Good For?

Many mainboards and laptops these days come with a range of M.2 slots, with only a subset capable of NVME SSDs, and often a stubby one keyed for ‘WiFi’ cards. Or that’s what those…

Macbook Gets NVMe SSD With Help Of A BGA-Imitating PCB

Recently, we stumbled upon a video by [iBoff], adding an M.2 NVMe port to a 2011-2013 MacBook. Apple laptops never came with proper M.2 ports, especially the A1278 – so what’s up? The t…

A Real GPU On The Raspberry Pi — Barely.

[Jeff Geerling] saw the Raspberry Pi Compute Module 4 and its exposed PCI-Express 1x connection, and just naturally wondered whether he could plug a GPU into that slot and get it to work. It didn&#…

This Laptop Gets All The PCIe Devices

Did you ever feel like your laptop’s GPU was sub-optimal, or perhaps that your laptop could use a SAS controller? [Rob Rogers] felt like that too, so now he has the only Dell Latitude busines…